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My C++ Tool Belt

I suspect that every developer has a “tool belt” that he or she uses to be productive. By that I mean a collection of tools, libraries and whatever else helps. With a few exceptions, these tool belts will probably be language specific, or at least platform specific. As my projects updated their compilers and transitioned to C++11 and beyond, my C++ tool belt changed quite a bit. Since things like threading, smart pointers and functional abstractions where added to the standard library, those are now already included by default. Today I wanna write about what is in my modernized C++11 tool belt.

The Standard Library

Ever since the tr1 extensions, the standard library has progressed into becoming truly powerful and exceptional. The smart pointers, containers, algorithms are much more language extensions than “just” a library, and they play perfectly with actual language features, such as lambdas, auto and initializer lists.

fmtlib

fmtlib provides placeholder-based text formatting a la Python’s String.format. There have been a few implementations of this idea over the years, but this is the first where I think that it might just dethrone operator<< overloading for good. It's fast, stable, portable and has a nice API.
I begin to miss this library the moment I need to work on a project that does not have it.
The next best thing is Qt’s QString::arg mechanism, with slightly inferior API, a less inclusive license, and a much bigger dependency.

spdlog

Logging is a powerful tool, both for software development and maintenance. Chances are you are going to need it at one point. spdlog is my favorite choice for this task. It uses fmtlib internally, which is just another plus point. It’s simple, fast and very nice to use due to reuse of fmtlib’s formatting. I usually just include this in my projects and get the included fmtlib for free.

optional

This one is actually part of the most recent C++17, but since that is not widely available yet (meaning not many projects have adopted it), I’m going to list it explicitly. There are also a few alternative implementations, such as the one in Boost or akrzemi1’s single-header variant.
Unlike many other programming languages, C++ has a relatively high emphasis on value types. While reference types usually have a built-in “not available” state (a.k.a. nullptr, NULL, Nothing or nil), an optional can transport intent much clearer. For value types, however, it’s absolutely mandatory to have an optional type. Otherwise, you just end up wrapping the value in a pointer just to make it optional.
Do not, however, fall into the trap of using optional for error handling. It’s not made for that, and other abstractions, such as expected are much better for that.

CMake

There is really only one choice when it comes to build tools, and that’s CMake. It’s got its own bunch of weaknesses, but the goods far outweight the bads. With the target_ functions, it’s actually quite nice and scales really well to bigger projects. The main downside here is that it still does not play nice with some tools, most notably visual studio. CLion and QtCreator fare much better. Then again, CMake enables the use of other tools easily, such as clang-tidy.

A word on Boost

Boost is no longer the must-have it once was. Much of the mandated functionality has already been incorporated into the standard library. It is no longer a requirement for a sane C++ project. On the contrary, boost is notoriously huge and somewhat cumbersome to integrate. Boost is not a library, it is a collection of libraries, therefore you can still decide whether to use Boost on a library by library basis. However, much of that is viral, and using a small part of Boost will easily drag in a few hundreds of other Boost headers. The libraries I tend to include most often are Boost.Utility (for boost::noncopyable) and Boost.Filesystem. The former is obviously easy to do without Boost, especially with = delete; and the latter is a part of the standard library since C++17. I hope to be doing the majority of my projects without it in the future. Boost was a catalyst for most of the C++ progress in recent years. It slowly becoming obsolete, either by being integrated into the standard or it’s idioms no longer being needed, is just a sign of its own success.

My honorable mentions are Qt and the stb single file libraries. What are your go-to tools?